Читать книгу Temporariness - John Kinsella - Страница 13

Difficult and full fortnight of work coming up before I have to travel solo to London on bus, ferry and train.

Went to Kinsale yesterday—a cold town that is dragged down (for all its boutique holiday sell) into its early seventeenth-century historical vacuum. Its ‘Englishness’ riles against its Irish suffering of the time (and after). It seems anathema to me. Its old court building museum has closed, the tide was out, and the star fort (Charles Fort) was austere, brutal and only ‘lit up’ by the non-comprehending selfying of teenagers poured out of and then crammed back into tourist buses. One could see how the Spanish Fleet (pre the 1670s fort) was pincered into the harbour by English guns. The fort was like a pacifist black hole of military-historical fetishism (of unresolvable ironies). I stood watching a cormorant working the water.

We travelled back via Ballinspittle and Timoleague alongside Courtmacherry Bay (and inlet) towards and through Clonakilty then home via Skib. We had travelled from home via Bandon and Dunmanway. Was fascinated to see nine swans feeding in a line that clearly moved higher up the flats as the tide was coming in fast. There’s a poem about space I need to think about.

Today I was caught in a waking dream of driving the road from Calingiri to Wongan Hills at the height of summer—I could taste the dust and the stubble in the burning air and the blue sky seared me through the windscreen. It is cold here today and the rooks strop their beaks, remorseless in their calling, calling.

On Friday a massive wedding—four-hundred people. The village is still coming down from its high. It was a son of our landlady—she has been excited about it for weeks now (and no doubt longer!).

And between Skib and Bally as we were returning yesterday we passed Kilcoe Church and there was a line of hundreds of people in pairs (cars parked everywhere) filing in and out of the building. A funeral? It also marked me, and I will long remember it as an overwhelming and humbling impression/vision amidst the rough roads and furze.